Why did we Invest in Triple Tap Games?
Triple Tap Games is a gaming studio centred on building ‘relax and unwind’ hybrid-casual experiences for a global audience. They blend innovative design, AI-driven development, and a deep understanding of casual gaming to deliver engaging and accessible experiences to gamers around the world.
In February 2025, they raised a $1.2 million pre-seed round led by Eximius Ventures and Kalaari Capital. While we were quite keen on the hybrid-casual model, the following inspired us to invest in Triple Tap Games and their thesis on the gaming industry:
1. The Decline of Hyper-Casual Games and the Rise of a New Genre
Between 2016 and 2019, hyper-casual games were the dominant entity in the gaming landscape. Centred on the core tenets of simplicity, visual flair, and ease-of-play, these games employed intuitive core-loops with little emphasis on progression to entice a wide set of gamers. This enhanced accessibility led to user acceptance which was exacerbated massively by the Covid Pandemic. As a result of their universal appeal during this period, 27% of downloads amongst the top 1000 games in 2019 were hyper-casual.
However, 2020 marked a seismic shift for this genre. With the deprecation of IDFA, Apple granted users the ability to opt-out of sharing their online journeys which led to advertisers losing a large chunk of their visibility and their ability to fine-tune their campaigns for greater personalisation. This was coupled with the fact that the users who were inducted into online gaming by hyper-casual experiences were now looking for something deeper that they could feel motivated to keep coming back to over a longer period. While hyper-casual experiences did excel with their intuitive loops, they lacked the kind of content depth that could retain users for longer periods and get them to spend more.
When confronted by rising UA (User-Acquisition) costs and an alienated fan-base, publishers and studios decided they needed to imbue the accessibility of the hyper-casual model with deeper retention levers to create long-lasting titles. This philosophy birthed a new genre entirely — Hybrid-Casual Games.
2. The Onset of the Hybrid-Casual Era (The Best of Two Worlds)
As the decline in hyper-casual games’ popularity became apparent, developers and publishers around the world realised that they had to straddle two dynamics to ensure long-term success — accessibility in core loops (central gameplay mechanics), and depth in content and progression. While the intuitive core-loops in hyper-casual were critical in bringing in large and diverse audiences, developers had to marry that with not just adequate content, but also progression levers in terms of meta-loops that could help gamers develop deeper relationships with their games and nudge them towards better long-term retention and higher ARPUs (Average Revenue per User).
Thus, the focus had shifted from just optimising on CPIs (Cost per Install) to emphasising on D7 ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) as well for profitability. To execute this, developers became aggressively implementing progression tracking mechanics, live-op events, social forums, leader-board systems, etc. across all their titles. This approach led to successful titles like Survivor.io (>$200Mn in revenue, >100M in downloads) and Stumble Guys (>$100M in revenue, >500M in downloads) which have not just garnered exponential download figures, but also notable monetization at scale.
The hybrid-casual era became the budding ground of innovation for new start-ups. However, finding balance between depth and accessibility is an incredibly complex process. If the game is too complex, CPIs can end up being bloated, and if it is too simple, the monetization potential will be hindered. Thus, to create outsized outcomes in this space consistently requires a team that is not only experienced, but also in-touch with their customers and what they need.
3. An Exceptional Team
Helmed by Karan Khairajani, Triple Tap Games is an exceptional team that has proven its prowess over a decade. Karan is a seasoned founder whose last stint was at Firescore Interactive where he built immensely successful hyper-casual games like Soap Cutting, Acrylic Nails, and Hair Dye. Their games garnered over 400 million downloads leading to their acquisition by Crazy Labs, one of the biggest publishers in the world with over 6 billion downloads. Post this acquisition, he led Crazy Labs’ initiatives in India providing other developers an ecosystem of support and mentorship. Across his entire journey, Karan has not only shown an incredible grasp of his audience, but also immense precision in finding key market gaps and how to best leverage them.
Importantly, most of the team at Triple Tap has been together nearly for the past decade. This has helped them in garnering considerable experience in not just developing games, but also optimising them for large audiences for long-term outcomes.
Thus, the team at Triple Tap Games is well-acquainted with the nuances of how to best design a game and they can capture this growing genre and scale to global audiences.
Conclusion
The last decade saw hyper-casual, once the most lucrative genre in the gaming, fall from grace. Prompted not just by changing privacy policies, but the very nature of these games failed to sustain users for longer periods which hindered their sustainability and monetizability. This trend was exemplified by 2021 where despite representing 27% of all mobile downloads, the genre only received $3.4 billion in revenue which was only 3.7% of the market. Thus, while the idea of using intuitive core-loops from hyper-casual proved to be a major success, developers were keen to imbue greater depth in their titles.
This philosophy led to the genesis of ‘hybrid-casual’ games where developers sought to add greater content depth, and more defined progression levers to optimise on long-term retention and quicker buyback periods. A pivot to this thesis led to several notable games generating hundreds of millions of downloads and notable monetization. However, to be able to build for this space, founders need to find the perfect harmony between simplicity and complexity which is an exceptionally hard process.
Triple Tap Games is not just helmed by a seasoned founder in Karan, but also features an industry-leading team that has worked together over the past decade to build exceptional titles that have garnered tremendous success. In addition to expeditious execution, the Triple Tap Games team excels at understanding their audience with great lucidity to fine-tune `their titles. This set of unique skill makes them well positioned to build long-standing hybrid-casual for the entire world.
We are very proud to be a part of Triple Tap’s growth story and wish them all the best!
